My Favorite Classic Comedies

My Favorite Classic Comedies

Back in May of 1997 I offered up a list of my 50 favorite movie comedies of all time. Eventually it seemed to me that it was time to update the list, adding a few more, perhaps dropping one or two. Of course, that didn’t quite work out the way I’d hoped, and now I have a list of my 77favorite comedies! Thanks to those of you who suggested some I’d missed.

As before, I’ve tried to avoid listing films by the same directors or actors over and over. Thus you won’t find 20 Woody Allen films here, even though I love them all. Nor all the Monty Python or Mel Brooks films, either.

These are mostly pure comedies, not comedy/dramas or musical comedies or action/adventure. They are all sound films, because the silent film comedy is a genre unto itself, which I hope to deal with separately. I also wanted to list films that are easily available on videotape.

There are no current films on this list (and only a handful from the 90s, including one fairly recent film which is already a cult classic), because one of my requirements is that the movie has to make me laugh out loud even after repeated viewings

.

The mid-60s through the mid-70s was my favorite period, representing close to half of the films on this list. I’m sure that’s just a personal thing; the decade after I graduated from high school was probably when I had the most fun and saw the most movies. (Even though I didn’t inhale, I still found myself laughing a lot!) And it might seem as if hardly anybody has made me laugh since 1989 except Billy Crystal, but sometimes a person just gets on a roll. I felt the same way about Jack Lemmon in the late 50s and early 60s, Barbara Stanwyck in 1941, and Mel and Woody in the 70s. Who can explain it?

With all that having been (probably unnecessarily) said, here they are, in chronological order, with links to the Internet Movie Database.